Monday, March 17, 2008

fog and waterdrop

I'm sad today but I don't want to talk about it, so instead we will address yet again the question of the Scary Mannequin at Bellaggio Everyday on Biltmore Avenue. She's on the left side, plotting evilly, as you can see from her curled up plotting hands and her evil expression. She's plotting so evilly, in fact, that she forgot her skirt. Yeah, she's just wearing leggings and a shirt and frankly, it's not working for her. You don't look and think, wow, scary mannequin in cool clothes! You think, wow, scary mannequin forgot to put her pants on. Poor scary mannequin! How embarrassing! She is surrounded by highly groovy luggage, though, so no doubt she has some more clothes in there.

In other news it rained most of Saturday and I took this picture of clouds advancing towards downtown on our way to Broadways. At Broadways I briefly got my Irish license revoked for not immediately recognizing a Pogues song on the jukebox but I came back fast by pointing out that it was from that Pogues album recorded after they'd kicked Shane out of the band and replaced him with Joe Strummer, so it doesn't really count. Then M & I went home and watched No Country for Old Men, which is incredible but really scary and dark and heavy duty.

I don't really do St. Patrick's day, actually. It's kind of amateur night, I think snottily, and the bars are too crowded so I don't usually do a damn thing except, perhaps, listen to some Pogues. Some real, Shane McGowan era Pogues. But one must do something and as it is Saint Patrick's Day today of course, sure and begorrah and stuff, I made corned beef & potatoes & cabbage last night as is required. It was kind of horrible, too, but oh well - it was not a disaster on the scale of Friday's "gnocchi" which took me three hours to make and turned out, after all that, to be in fact lemon flavored mashed potatoes. This is the second time I've tried to make gnocchi and the second resounding disaster, so I think I might give up trying that one. Still, it was kind of fun: there's nothing like spending all that time making the potatoes and smushing them with egg yolks and rolling them out into ropes and cutting each rope into pieces and rolling each tiny piece on a fork for indentations and chilling it and so on - only to put the gnocchi gently into boiling water and watch them instantly disintegrate back into mashed potatoes. I mean it's moments like that where you must laugh long and hard.